A-bomb Images

Atomic bombing as seen from photographs

At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb dropped by the U.S. military exploded at an altitude of 600 meters above Hiroshima, destroying the city below. Befitting its description as an ‘indiscriminate weapon of destruction,’ the atomic bomb killed innumerable civilians. In this way, a single nuclear weapon led to the unimaginable. Numerous photographs, however, serve as silent “witnesses” to what happened in the city after the atomic bombing. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, survey teams, military personnel, and members of the public captured the reality of the tragedy with their cameras. In April 2021, five photographic negatives taken by former Chugoku Shimbun photojournalist Yoshito Matsushige (1913∼2005) were designated as important tangible cultural properties by the Hiroshima City government. They are the only photographic record of the circumstances Hiroshima’s people faced beneath the mushroom cloud on the day of the atomic bombing, and the first photographic negatives of the A-bomb devastation to be designated as Hiroshima’s cultural property.